https://streetwave.co/mobile-networks/2g-switch-off-by-count...
Ref: https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/media-communications-arts/...
Dumb phones are still being sold that are 2G only.
Not just that, but “landlines” are still being offered that are really a 2G phone restricted to work only in the vicinity of a home that's not (yet?) covered by actual landlines.
It's also used by emergency services.
It's considered a technology of last resort, and the service provider that wins the concession to provide it, with 100% coverage of a given area, probably finds it useful that it can meet the conditions with such tech.
3G has already shut down.
Things that uses 2G:
- Electricity meters
- Alarm systems
- Cooling and heating systems
- Rat traps (?)
- And an absolute crap-ton of early "IoT" devices.
1G (NMT) and 2G networks have been used in forestry. Very often the machines are far from a mast and need the extra range to communicate.
And in general Finland is a sparsely populated country.
Not for everything. When I can do that I do, but it’s getting harder and harder to avoid subscription fees for everything these days.
Take a subscription product that costs $10/mo right now as an example.
Let's say you want a license that lasts your whole life.
Estimate the time you have remaining in your life. Let's call it 50 years.
Now you can use an interest calculator to see how much it would cost to effectively buy a license until the end of your life.
Plug in $10/mo contribution, plus 4% annual interest to cover inflation and price increases, for an investment length of 50 years.
So you can effectively buy an "eternal" license for $18,714.61
I guess technology lasting a long time for specific non-commercial purposes is one thing, keeping up with modern society in general another.
It's not the fault of the phone's hardware that the world has moved on. But this underscores my point: if the hardware lasts longer than the eco-system around it, that's useless, and the company should have probably saved customers a few pennies by going with something less sturdy.
Adobe Creative Cloud (among many others) doesn't have that option.
I worked at a large project management app where we charged per-seat.
We only offered per seat pricing, yet we had at least 3 companies that had flat pricing because they wanted >100k seats.
Deals outside of standard pricing gets cut all the time.
But having an older version can be useful too because some features from previous releases may be missing in current ones, so that's a way to ensure access to the old files. A couple of years ago all the Pantone colours used in Photoshop just became black after an update because Adobe stopped licensing Pantone stuff.
Where do you buy long lasting stuff? This is a serious question, I'm looking for new appliances and I am willing to pay more, within reason.
Let's say I'd pay double of what an appliance with similar technical characteristics would normally cost, which I want to go towards higher quality materials, craftsmanship, and quality assurance. I expect such an appliance to work and and be economically repairable for at least 20 years.
As far as I can tell, this is nearly impossible. Many brands that used to produce higher quality products have downgraded the quality of their materials and craftsmanship in order to juice quarterly profits for investors. Their reputation seems to lag the quality of their products by about 10 years.
Miele is good for household appliances like washing machines and dishwashers. Kärcher is good for vacuum cleaners. There's lots of other German (and Swiss and Japanese etc) brands like that.
But in any case, I didn't (and can't) promise that you can get that kind of quality by merely paying double.
Btw, almost all cars these days last a lot longer than they used to, and with fewer repairs. Quality has gone up across the board. Planes also fall out of the sky less often. (And that includes Boeing, despite their recent troubles, their track record would be seen as unachievable good about 20 years ago.)
Would that 'twere so simple. Most previously reliable premium manufacturers have jumped on the enshittification bandwagon. You can get better design and a more exclusive branding if you are willing to pay more, but where exactly would you turn if you are looking, for example, for a dish washer that will just work for the next ten years? Preferably one that doesn't come with cloud integration. There are still a very small number of ultra-premium brands that really care about their customers, but apart from being way too expensive for most people, they are increasingly hard to find. One of the side-effects of so many companies trading their reputations for "shareholder value" is that trust is eroded for everyone, including those that still deserve it.
Miele works well for us.
I understand your complaint. I'm also sure it's really hard to get high quality buggy whips these days without paying through the nose, now that everyone has switched to these newfangled horseless carriages.
That's what I would have said as well, until recently. Last year we had to replace ours, and its been an absolute nightmare. Cost us endless hours of wrangling with technicians and customer service to have it installed and configured properly (and already repaired once). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We never had any issue with Miele in Singapore.
(The Australian customer service of Bosch was a joke, though. The one in Singapore seems competent, though.)
Where do you recommend I buy long-lasting refrigerators, washers, and dryers?
You can buy long lasting stuff just fine, if you are willing to pay. You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay.
It's all about trade-offs, and many people have priorities that are different from 'last as long as possible'. Eg many computers from the 1980s are still perfectly usable today, but who would want to use them? I'm sure you can probably also still use your old rugged Nokia phone today, especially since they had easily replaceable batteries. But who would want to use a 25 year old dumb phone?
There are some enthusiasts which do use these old devices. And it's great that they can do so! Never say corporations don't deliver!
But by and large people have different priorities than wanting their obsolete tech to live forever.